Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Invoke and Comfy are both incredibly complicated tools, and I've recently been put off by both communities.

The r/StableDiffusion folks will go as far as calling those complaining about comfy "PEBKACs", which is a term I hadn't seen since the 00's.

Neither tool is really appropriate for beginners, and frankly they're not even fun to use for extended periods as they're constantly breaking.

If all you're trying to do is generate images, it's not worth installing a universe of broken Python and 100 GB of weights on your machine.

It honestly feels like 2000's-era Linux hobbyists proclaiming the "Year of Linux on the desktop" when interacting with these communities. Their tools are busted, but lots of folks will blame you, the user.

View on HN

For context, I'm Invoke's CEO.

I'm not going to argue that they're not complicated tools - Invoke and Comfy are both actively used to push the boundaries of what can be achieved in professional generative media.

But I'd be curious to hear what issues you ran into with Invoke, and where you found issues with the community -- Or, are you generalizing across SD reddit?

We try to do a pretty good job keeping things welcome, and are nearing 100 videos of educational content to help folks learn how to use GenAI. Open to feedback on where we can promote more accessibility.

The best I've found is using asdf and venv for each of these python ML projects. Install the python version they assume, create and source a virtual env, install their dependencies, then activate the venv's when you boot up a terminal to run them again.

That still doesn't solve the other half of the issues that Python has with dependency management, but this method at least keeps me sane about it.

edit: and also not sure how I'd even start incorporating this into Invoke/Comfy... I've been using the latter but I'm not that comfy with it.

Yes, these are largely prototyping tools. I'm not fond of Invoke's "professional" pitch in particular, this workflow would feel alien for any actual creative. However AI CGI is more like 3D CGI in the sense that you have to get technical and understand what you're doing. There are a bit more competent tools in this busted-tool world if you want to get things done, e.g.: https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion . It still a nerdy tool and has way more friction than necessary, with all this python hell (it uses Comfy as a backend, although it's somewhat automated). It's far from being as easy as Adobe's Firefly.

Invoke is actually one of the easier tools to use - providing the ability to download model checkpoints in place, relatively easy inpainting, etc.

ComfyUI is definitely for the bleeding edge.

Forge is a good middle ground. With the huge number of tutorials available on YouTube (Olivio's channel is good for novices), I don't think it's that particularly difficult for beginners to grok, but it does require some patience and follow through.

If all you care about is generating some generic looking images for your blog and don't want any flexibility, you can always pay for a subscription to Midjourney.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com